Reply to Ward 2 & 3 should have school district autonomy

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[quote=Anonymous]East-of-the-Park lifestyles

For years after the 1968 Martin Luther King riots, all of DC east of Rock Creek Park was in decline and not very desirable. Mount Pleasant for some years consisted of inexpensive rooming houses. In time, the residential areas closest to the Park began to recover, middle-class people (like yours truly) buying houses in Mount Pleasant and Crestwood. But this recovery extended only a few blocks to the east of the Park. Columbia Heights remained, for years, a rough neighborhood, with some of the highest crime rates in the District. Schools were poor, and shops catered to a low-income clientele. Residents looking for better shops and schools quite naturally zipped across the Park to the wealthier neighborhoods to our west, Cleveland Park, Woodley Park, Tenleytown, Georgetown, et cetera. Even Mayor Marion Barry, a prototypical urban-black politician, sent his children to Murch Elementary, west of Rock Creek Park (all the way from Southeast DC). For us residents of Mount Pleasant and Crestwood, our homes were east of the Park, but our shops, restaurants, and schools were west of the Park.

That placed a premium on travel from east to west, especially in the morning, when rushing one's children to school, then hurrying off to work. Here in Mount Pleasant, there was a heavy rush every morning of cars heading west, to those "better" west-of-the-Park schools, such as Murch and Eaton. Few professional-class residents of Mount Pleasant were willing to send their children to our neighborhood school, Bancroft. (As of 2003, Bancroft was just 2% white non-Hispanic, in a neighborhood that was at least 35% white non-Hispanic.)[/quote]

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